I was surprised to see her. I didn’t expect her to be in the backyard when I made it home that evening. I wasn’t even at home really; after all the flooding from the hurricane, my partner and I left the mountains and stayed at Roy’s house in Rock Hill, SC. Valeria was ecstatic to get out of the mountains after everything; we had been stranded in our home with no electricity for two days before the roads were clear for travel. Rather than wait for the power to return, which we were told could take days and actually took a week and a day, Roy was nice enough to let us stay with him and we’ve been here for a couple weeks now. I’ve enjoyed spending so much time with him. He lives alone and it took me back to my youth when my siblings and I spent intense time during the summer doing everything we wanted to do around Ladoga. Roy, Valeria, and I play video games, Magic the Gathering, and we enjoy sitting around the fire in his backyard fire pit. We’ve been having too good a time probably, but we’re celebrating 10 years of the PRL Serials so we are in a nostalgic place overall.
Everyone knows that they can find me at Roy’s place, everyone who called to check on us after the hurricane, I mean. I hadn’t spoken to the woman in over a year, and frankly I didn’t have any reason to expect to see her.
When you pull all the way into Roy’s driveway along the side of the house, you end up at the brick wall that separates the driveway from the backyard, and as I pulled up, I saw her sitting there with Roy on the brick patio. They were laughing, and I was honestly surprised to see Roy so easygoing with a stranger. But she is very easy to talk to and Roy was telling her about his favorite new deck that he uses to play cards online. He’s been bragging about his blue-black faerie deck for weeks now but he has yet to build a physical deck to prove its prowess; but I digress.
“Witches have such a bad reputation,” she was saying when I walked over. Valeria came out back and pulled up a chair as well. “But the fae are so much worse. You can go your whole life without pissing off a witch, but the fae are just waiting for a reason to put a curse on you. I would bet every penny I have that more people have died because of the fae than witches.”
“Fairies are real?” Roy asked. “I feel like if they were that wouldn’t even be a question.”
The woman threw her head back and laughed. “Baseline humans underestimate the power of beings like the fae and witches. Their power makes them invisible. The fae are like trap spiders, you only see them when they spring their traps and then there is no escape. And they don’t look like they used to. The description of the fae that you see in movies and things is outdated. The fae have not been that small for ages. They mixed and mingled with humans just like weres and vampires, so they are impossible to distinguish by anyone but witches or other magic sensitives.”
“Now you’re just being funny,” Roy said dismissively. “No magic is strong enough to hide vampires and werewolves.”
“It’s not just magic. The fae are human looking, weres are human looking.”
“So I could be fae and not realize it?” Roy asked.
“You’re not fae,” the woman shook her head. “You are like your friend Wes here, witchkin. You were born with a proclivity for witchcraft.”
“Witchkin?” I asked. She had never used that word before and though it sounded vaguely familiar, I wanted to make sure that I understood.
“That is the nomenclature, I believe,” she explained. “Of course, a human, a were, and a vampire can be witchkin, but the fae don’t use the same arcana enhanced by the moon as the witchkin. You, Roy, are witchkin, and I wouldn’t be surprised if your family has a connection to some animal and are weres.”
“What if it’s like a possum?” Roy said glibly.
“That would be funny,” she said honestly.
“Do people with a were connection randomly change?”
“No,” the woman assured him. “In fact, only a were who is aware of the ability can make the change. If a were never learns that changing is possible, they will never realize their potential. But don’t ask me too much about that. I only know witches who happen to be weres, and I’ve never really asked them too much about the change.”
I was sitting by then, with a stack of books from the library on my lap.
“So theoretically,” I interrupted, “Roy and I could start a coven. I know that I’m disconnected from my ancestral powers, but Roy and I could make something new together if we’re both witchkin.”
“You’ve been watching Agatha haven’t you?” the woman asked with a chuckle. “It’s a good show, I’m into it. I like how real all the characters feel. They seem like the kinds of people I’ve known in the past, especially Agatha, though the Agatha I knew was nothing like this one. The Agatha I knew lived in Durham and she practiced necromancy in the basement of the clinic her husband operated for decades. The sweetest woman you will ever meet, school teacher for most of her life. It is hard to use dark magic for good, a witch with a conscience swallows a lot of curses and poisons, but Agatha was tough. She was a God fearing woman and she used her faith to counter the darkness.”
“What did she use her magic for?” I asked, one of us asked.
“You ever hear a story about someone waking up in the funeral home before they’re buried?”
“I mean, not, like, from another person,” Roy said carefully, trying to make a distinction. “I’m sure I’ve read about it or saw it on TV somewhere, but I couldn’t give you an example. So it’s not something I ever believed really happens or happens often. This Agatha brought people back to life?”
The woman nodded. “Sometimes it didn’t happen fast enough, too, and there was a lady in Durham who went to that free clinic, her people brought her in one afternoon after her husband beat her senseless. They didn’t call an ambulance because they didn’t want to have to pay for it and the clinic was close enough. Agatha’s husband knew he couldn’t do anything for her, and Agatha was working that day, so when her husband called to see if she could work her magic for this poor lady, Agatha was only able to lay hands on her for a little while before the ambulance he had to call arrived to take her to the emergency room. The lady seemed to survive the ambulance ride but was dead at the hospital. But before she was embalmed at the funeral home, she woke up and life returned to her. Agatha was trying to restore her, not bring her back to life, so that wouldn’t have been as hard to do, but still. Using dark magic to restore life requires a trade with dark beings who have the access to make it happen, so Agatha only did that sparingly, like to help very young victims of gun violence. Rapid healing can be done by most any kind of witch without dark pacts.”
“But she brought some people back to life at her husband’s clinic?” I asked.
The woman nodded. “She did. She had a standing pact with a demon that allowed her to usher souls between life and death, and she healed the body with her general skills.”
“What was her pact with the demon?”
“She never told me. If she had told anyone, I don’t think it would have worked. She was giving the demon something that it prized to save the few people she did, and the demon wouldn’t want to risk whatever that was, so it probably insisted she not speak of it to anyone. I imagine that we would all find it horrible, but as far as I know, the secret died with her. Necromancy is very dangerous magic. Dealing with the forces beyond this mortal existence is dangerous for the living. I called it a demon because that is easy for you all to understand, but they aren’t subservient to some devil figure. They just exist as fundamental forces of existence.”
This instantly made me think of weird fiction classics, Maupassant and Chambers, but I didn’t want to interrupt her by saying anything, and I knew Roy was probably thinking the same thing.
“I should say before I get too distracted with all this, that you all already are a coven. I feel your energies and they are positive and powerful.”
“We use our magic to create the Serials,” Roy joked.
“Great,” I said dismissively, “now let’s get back to these demons.”
PRL Serials 